LAUSR

Steering control is a vital function for autonomous vehicles, whose performance largely determines the driving safety. The widely used feedback steering controllers degrade significantly when vehicles drive at high speeds. This is mainly because these controllers can not effectively exploit nonlinear vehicle dynamics and future road information. Hence, the steering actions generated by these controllers can not achieve accurate and stable path tracking performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose a deep learning based Monte Carlo Tree Search (DeepMCTS) method to enhance the feedback controllers. Due to the accuracy of the learning-based model in characterizing nonlinear vehicle dynamics and the lookahead search ability of MCTS, the control performance of the feedback controllers can be enhanced significantly. Different from MPC methods, which leverage vehicle dynamics and future road information via online optimization, our method relies on the efficient tree search process. Hence, our method can avoid heavy computational burden. Testing results validate the proposed method can achieve better tracking accuracy and stability in high speeds scenarios.